Phia, an AI-powered shopping startup founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins. Other backers include Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin, Desiree Gruber, and Sheryl Sandberg.
Gates is the daughter of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates and has been active in philanthropy, education initiatives, and impact investing. Kianni is a climate activist who founded Climate Cardinals, a nonprofit focused on translating climate information into multiple languages and has served as a United Nations youth adviser on climate change.
Launched in April 2025, Phia offers an iOS app and browser extension that compares prices, calculates resale value, summarizes product details, and tracks price changes in real time. The company says it has attracted 500,000 users, signed more than 5,000 brand partnerships, and generated tens of millions of dollars in sales in its first five months.
Phia’s platform hosts billions of fashion products and adds hundreds of millions more daily. It also maintains a database of more than 300 million secondhand fashion items, which it says is among the largest in the U.S.
Annie Case, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, said the firm invested after seeing Phia address “key pain points: helping consumers compare prices and discover new brands, while giving brands lower acquisition costs, better discoverability, and smarter retargeting.”
Phia plans to use the funding to expand its engineering, AI research, product, and marketing teams and to develop proprietary large language models and GPU infrastructure. The company said it is building a personalized shopping agent trained in user transaction data, supported by its own multimodal models designed to operate at lower cost and faster speed than existing systems.
“It’s a product I believe in, in an industry I care deeply about,” said Rubin, founder and CEO of Fanatics.
Phia is based in New York and employs staff with experience at Pinterest, Amazon, Meta, and Google, as well as alumni from Stanford University, Columbia University, Harvard University and Georgia Institute of Technology.
Sign up
Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News. It covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact Mark Brohan, senior vice president of B2B and Market Research, at mark@digitalcommerce360.com. Follow him on Twitter @markbrohan. Follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and YouTube.
Favorite